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The Doomsday Clock has remained at 100 seconds, staying the closest to midnight it has ever been for the second year running.
Maintaining last year’s grim record means the clock’s keepers perceived threat of global apocalypse has not cooled off in the past 12 months – citing nuclear holocaust and climate change as the real threats to humanity, not Covid.
Rachel Bronson, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, cited the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as one of the reasons for this year’s count, saying: “We recognise that humanity continues to suffer as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads around the world.
“The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly.
“In this time of genuine crisis, governments around the world too often abdicated responsibility, ignored scientific advice, did not co-operate to communicate effectively and consequently failed to protect health and welfare of their citizens.”
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The somewhat symbolic measure sees the non-profit group the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists meet annually to decide whether the events of the previous year have pushed humanity and the planet closer to the brink of destruction, or further away.
How close we are to ‘Doomsday’ is literally represented by how close the clock – or humanity is to ‘midnight’, or to sealing its dire fate.
Obviously, the further the clock is from midnight, the safer the world is.
And, at 3pm today, the scientists made their 2021 Doomsday Clock announcement – deciding whether to move the hand a tick closer.
They decided to keep it at the perilously close 100 seconds to midnight, as the pandemic showed just how “unprepared” the world is to manage “complex and dangerous challenges”, such as the remaining nuclear threat and climate change.
The scientists said humanity is still as close to apocalypse as ever before, at today’s announcement.
In a long and detailed statement published on their website, the Bulletin’s scientists said: “Humanity continues to suffer as the pandemic spreads around the world.
“In 2020 alone, this novel disease killed 1.7 million people and sickened at least 70 million more.
“The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly.
“In this time of genuine crisis, governments too often abdicated responsibility, ignored scientific advice, did not cooperate or communicate effectively, and consequently failed to protect the health and welfare of their citizens.
“As a result, many hundreds of thousands of human beings died needlessly.”
However, the scientists said the pandemic, though “lethal on a massive scale”, is not an “existential threat.”
It will not, they said, “obliterate civilization” but instead serves as a “historic wake-up call, a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or the other dangers, including more virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare, that could threaten civilization in the near future.”
The scientists warned that nuclear programs were accelerated in multiple countries, and it is this which “moved the world into less stable and manageable territory last year.”
Referencing the tumultuous US presidency of Donald Trump, the statement went on to raise the fear of “miscalculation in times of tension” in the use of nuclear weapons.
“Events like the deadly assault earlier this month on the US Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons,” the statement added.
“Nuclear nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks.
“By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war, an ever-present danger over the last 75 years, increased in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats, what we called ‘the new abnormal’ in 2019, tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.”
The scientists added that governments have “also failed to sufficiently address climate change.”
A pandemic-related economic slowdown temporarily reduced the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, they added, but warn that “over the coming decade fossil fuel use needs to decline precipitously if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided.”
However, fossil fuel development and production are projected to increase, they said, despite greenhouse gases hitting a record high in 2020 – one of the two warmest years on record.
The massive wildfires suffered in America and Australia in America and Australia of 2020 are “illustrations of the major devastation that will only increase if governments do not significantly and quickly amplify their efforts to bring greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero,” they warn.
Referring to the clock remaining at the same time as last year, the scientists warn the “existential threats of nuclear weapons and climate change have intensified in recent years because of a threat multiplier: the continuing corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision-making depend.”
The Covid-19 pandemic should be a “wake-up call”, they state, as “false and misleading information disseminated over the internet—including misrepresentation of Covid-19’s seriousness, promotion of false cures, and politicization of low-cost protective measures such as face masks—created social chaos in many countries and led to unnecessary death.”
In giving their reasons for not moving the clock closer to midnight, the scientists said that, “amid the gloom”, they do see some “positive developments”.
These include “the election of a US president who acknowledges climate change as a profound threat and supports international cooperation and science-based policy” – a reference to new US Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden.
Meanwhile Biden has also “offered to extend the New START arms control agreement with Russia for five years,” they point out.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added that, in the context of a post-pandemic return to relative stability across the globe, more such “demonstrations of renewed interest in and respect for science and multilateral cooperation could create the basis for a safer and saner world.”
However, because these developments have not yet yielded substantial progress toward a safer world, they are not sufficient to move the Clock away from midnight, the scientist said.
“But they are positive and do weigh against the profound dangers of institutional decay, science denialism, aggressive nuclear postures, and disinformation campaigns discussed in our 2020 statement,” they added.
“The members of the Science and Security Board therefore set the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse and the same time we set in 2020.”
It is deeply unfortunate that the global response to the pandemic over the past year has explicitly validated many of the concerns we have voiced for decades.”
Sounding a note of optimism, the scientists concluded by stating that they “continue to believe that human beings can manage the dangers posed by modern technology, even in times of crisis.”
But they warn that, if humanity is to avoid an existential catastrophe, and one that would “dwarf “anything it has yet seen, then national leaders “must do a far better job of countering disinformation, heeding science, and cooperating to diminish global risks.”
“They call on people around the world to “organize and demand, through public protests, at ballot boxes, and in other creative ways, that their governments reorder their priorities and cooperate domestically and internationally to reduce the risk of nuclear war, climate change, and other global disasters, including pandemic disease.
“We have experienced the consequences of inaction. It is time to respond,” they add.
As it stood prior to 3pm the time on the Doomsday Clock reads 100 seconds to midnight. Last year the Bulletin gave the clock a pessimistic push, reports DailyStar.
In 2020, the clock went from two minutes to midnight – to a mere 100 seconds to midnight – the closest it had ever been.
The Doomsday Clock was created by the nonprofit Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947, as a symbol representing how close we are to the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe.
Back then, they wanted a way of showing how close the world was to nuclear war.
At the time, the Chicago Atomic Scientists put the clock with its hand set seven minutes to midnight on the cover of their journal, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Since 2007 the clock also takes into account the effect of climate change on the world.
The organisation said last year: “The clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.”
At today’s announcement were, among others, former California Governor Jerry Brown, former president of Liberia and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and governor of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan, Hidehiko Yuzaki.
But before you go packing your apocalypse bag, remember the Bulletin has no actual way of knowing how close we are to doom.
Instead the clock measures how worried the board members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are about a global catastrophe. This is based on the general state of the world.
And it doesn’t have to only go the way of doom.
While the clock has been mostly inching toward doom over the last decade, it has been set at 17 minutes to midnight at its most optimistic setting, in 1991 – an improvement on the seven minutes to midnight at which it was set when it began in 1947.
Today we found whether the group of scientists believed we are closer to the apocalypse, further away from it, or if our perilous situation was to simply stay the same.
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